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A GIANT STEP FORWARD IN EDUCATION FOR SALES PEOPLE
My career destination was as a project manager. One of my colleagues started out in life as a local authority planner. However, we both ended up in sales and I am confident that 95% of sales people have similar stories. Sales was not a career destination. Even now there are few, well probably no career advisers who say “with your skill set you are ideally suited to selling”! After all there are no sales courses in schools and very few in higher or further education. It is no wonder that sales is not understood at the highest level in many companies.

However, I am pleased to say that this is going to change; it will be slow but it will change. I have spent a not inconsiderable amount of time working with The Association of Professional Sales and a number of companies, some small like Koru and some large like Whitbread, BT, BAE and the Royal Mail and some academics, to develop a degree level apprenticeship for a B2B Sales Professional. The standard for this has been agreed by the Institute for Apprenticeships (IFA). Another group in which Koru is involved is developing a level four (NVQ4, foundation degree) standard apprenticeship. It is not as advanced as the degree level but is getting there.

Apprenticeships have changed; once the domain of the school leaver going into manual trades they now include many “white collar” functions. There are no age barriers and people can start an apprenticeship at any age and at any point in their career.

In April of this year, organisations with a pay bill of over £3million have to pay an apprenticeship levy of half a percent of their pay bill to the Government. This is not confined to commercial organisations. Every organisation has to pay, private sector, public sector and third sector. If an organisation does nothing it is effectively a tax, and some organisations take that view but could be wasting valuable training and development money to invest in their staff. Smart companies are offering apprenticeships to improve performance and effectively get their money back. This is a training budget that management cannot cut when orders slow down!

But what about those companies who do not pay the levy? Many of our readers and customers fall into that category. In essence any monies unused by levy payers becomes available to this group together with anything that funding bodies cough up, which is unpredictable.

What will a degree level sales apprenticeship cost? To levy payers it is free, well it’s not as they have paid the levy. To non-levy payers it will cost 10% of the annual university course fee, currently £9000. I beg the question, is £900 pa too much to pay to achieve the following:
– It will obviously improve your sales skills, and indeed your coaching skills which will be of wider benefit
– Your customers will see you as a progressive company through your investment in skills, and they along with you will be beneficiaries
– It will help you to retain your top people
– You can use it as a demonstration to your people of your willingness to invest in true professional development
– Your chosen people will benefit in skills and personal development, have a degree, be paid (their salary and bonus), not have to move away from home, and unlike 99% of graduates will be debt free#

Food for thought, I hope. And here is something else to think about.
Anglia Ruskin University have a number of 90% funded places available for non levy paying companies. They are keen to fill these and have asked Koru to help them. You don’t have to wait to see if funding is available, it is here now. Don’t waste this fantastic opportunity to get involved and to reap the benefits it can bring to your business. Just give me call and let’s have a discussion.

In this issue of The SalesPulse we are going to examine how sales people and senior business leaders can learn from sports people to improve their own and their company’s performance. Our headline this week is a quotation from George Kruis, the Saracens, England and Great Britain and Ireland Lions second row forward.

So what is George’s obsession? Every Sunday afternoon he sits down with his lap top and watches clip after clip of his upcoming opponents so that he can learn their strengths and weaknesses, and work out how he can neutralise their strengths and exploit their weaknesses. He considers this laborious task one of the most important periods of training. He goes on to say that,

– “I think it is around 60 – 70% preparation and 30% is what you do the field”. He also says,

– “if you want to be the best, you have to put the time in”.

Over the years I have spent quite a lot of time training and coaching sales people, and one of the first topics we do cover is call planning. Only the best sales people follow George’s mantra regarding planning. They get the most out of sales calls be they face to face or on the phone. The better the call plan, the more progress you make, and the more progress you make the shorter the sales cycle.
The same applies to sales planning. How many of your salespeople, or you if you are the salesperson, actually plan how they will manage a campaign? Very few I would suggest. The classic sales response to planning is, I am here to sell so I spend as much time as possible with customers. It is not how much time people spend in front of customers, it is how much of that time is effective. So the two key points from this part of this SalesPulse are:

– Understand your competitors strengths and weaknesses and how you can use yours to beat them.
– Time spent planning properly reduces sales cycle times and increases effectiveness

Turning now to another great sports person; this time it is Ben Stokes the Durham and England cricketer and his attitude towards his job. Here is a quote from him “I’m always looking to improve, I am never happy with how I am going. I think once you get comfortable with what you are offering it is dangerous”. I have seen the outcomes of complacency many times. Competitors sneaking in and taking business because the company had only one customer relationship; people not attending training courses because they “knew it all” and were outsold by hungrier competitors and of course the loss of really valuable sales time because the seller didn’t qualify well enough. Unfortunately they depended on their customer angel who was equally complacent! Finally on this topic, how many sales people, managers and directors have a personal development plan. Not one that ticks all the HR processes boxes, but one that is personally developed, personally executed and personally measured against a benchmark e.g. the best salesperson in the team or a peer managing director. The key learning point from this section is:

– Resting on your laurels is not good enough; have a plan to keep getting better!

The final similarity that I want to draw between business, selling and sport concerns cycling. The British cycling team is the most successful team in British sport. They initially developed the carbon fibre bike which was the big game changer, but as is the case in business the competition soon caught up and their advantage disappeared. However, Sir Dave Brailsford, then head of British Cycling, coined the phrase “marginal gains”. A marginal gain is a very small improvement. It might only improve an individual’s performance by 0.1 of a percent. However, if you get enough of these gains then the impact can be quite sizeable; a 1% improvement in a lap time is the difference between winning and losing. Now strangely enough Sir Dave Brailsford took this philosophy from business. Those of you in Manufacturing will know this as continuous improvement or Kaizen, that originated in Toyota and used by many leading companies. Continuous Improvement is the search for perfection. In sales terms it is honing sales skills, increasing competitor knowledge, knowing the value of your offerings, understanding your customer business and markets, all underpinned by true leadership. The key learning point here is:
– Game changers are few and far between and your competitors will catch up very soon; have a programme of incremental improvements in how you sell as that is a sustainable differentiator

I am going to conclude with a quote from a true sporting leader. You might love him, hate him or never have heard of him but Sir Alex Ferguson was enormously successful. He said “My job was to make everyone understand that the impossible was possible. That’s the difference between leadership and management“.

In the last issue of the SalesPulse we examined the role of the empowered buyer and how the internet had enabled him or her to outwit the poor old sales person. We talked about how professional procurers were doing everything they can to commoditise your offerings. The two working together are contriving to make the seller’s life very difficult. But we ended by saying that sales people were empowered too and that is our topic this month.

So, what does this empowered seller look like?

Well just like buyers they have access to enormous amounts of data on their customers, their people, their competitors and markets. They can generate alerts when people change or are promoted, when press releases are issued and they can easily monitor quarterly, half yearly and annual business reports. They can connect with their customers’ people, post compelling comments and monitor when their customers read it. All in all the internet and social media gives them great insights. However this is not what empowers them, nor is it their managers that inspire them. These people are engaged not only with their own business but with their customers’ business as well. The empowered sales person is, indeed self motivated.

All this information and insights, together with their personal drive and acumen allows them to make unsolicited value propositions to their customer which short circuits the empowered buyer and his or her comrade in arms the procurement professional. They don’t wait for tenders or requests for quotations as they set the agenda by creating value for their customers. This value obviates pesky negotiations or time wasting tender preparation or beauty parades so loved by the professional buyer. As I said in the last issue of the SalesPulse they choose the battleground on which they want to fight, because they can win at the right price for both parties. Buyers cannot research a product or service that they don’t know about, or commoditise the empowered seller’s business knowledge, relationships and the value they bring to their customers’ business outcomes.

What other characteristics do these people have? They are low maintenance as far as management is concerned; they are avid learners. As a quote I stole from somewhere says, “The best earners are the best learners”. They are always available to help and develop their colleagues and they treat their sales quota or target, as a stepping stone to their personal goals.

There is a myth that managers motivate their people. The only person who can motivate me is me, and in your case it is you. What managers can do, is to create an environment where people can be motivated. A good way for sales managers to do this is to get their best people deeply involved with the business; trust them, ask them to help their colleagues and the the truly empowered sellers will. The biggest enabler in sales is success – success is contagious as is motivation.

The SalesPulse™ Insight

What do sports people and sales people have in common? A lot more than you would think. Our quote this month is as relevant to selling as it is to high performing athletes. In next month’s edition we will examine the similarities that sports people and sales people should share.

I have often written about how complexity wastes time and resources and as an outcome wastes money. Today I am going to talk about the empowered buyer and the negative impacts that this phenomenon has on sales and sales people. As an introduction though I would like to pass on an observation or two from comments I have heard at a couple of recent events I have attended. There is an obsession, if not a self-fulfilling prophecy about how difficult selling has become. Part of this is the statement that “the buyer is 57% of the way through their buying process before engaging with a salesperson”. Many others would argue that it closer to 67%

This statement originally came from the Corporate Executive Board, now part of Gartner, following extensive research. However, the cynic in me said they have an ulterior motive; the statement supported the Challenger Sale methodology they were peddling at the time.

Enough of that, although I do agree there are many instances where the statement could be true. For example, if a buyer is looking for a commodity, then a lot of research can be done and all that is left is the beauty (price) parade. However, even that can be avoided if the right approach is taken by the seller.

Let’s look at what an empowered buyer looks like. She or he is just a person with internet access. Never before has so much information been available. You don’t need to invite salespeople to tell you about their products, it’s there and you can research it in your time. You don’t have to advertise the fact that you’re seeking help, merely drawing up a list of potential contenders all of whom you believe can do the job. This person is aided and abetted by their colleagues in procurement, the formal buyers or purchasing officers who are working really hard to neutralise sellers’ USPs (unique selling propositions) so all they have to do is call for and host the tender process. Job done!

So, if you are selling office products, catering equipment or any number of simple products and services, the only skill, buyers think you need is being best at guessing the winning bid, provided your company is able to make a margin on it. As stated earlier I agree that in certain situations selling is becoming more difficult and if you hear it or are told it often enough you can quickly believe it.

But, sellers are also empowered; they have the same access to masses of information as buyers, the best are insightful, they don’t fight on the same battlefield as professional purchasers and they do not subscribe to the “it’s becoming harder” theory. In the next issue of the SalesPulse we will explore the world of the empowered seller.

The SalesPulse™ Insight – Professionalising Selling

Over the last nine months, Koru supported by ADM Computing, Aliaxis and WBS Group, has been working with The Association of Professional Sales, BT, Royal Mail, Whitbread, BAE Systems, SIG plc, Consalia. Kimberley Clark and a number of universities to develop a degree level apprenticeship for a Sales Professional. I am pleased to say that the apprenticeship has been approved by the Institute for Apprentices. While there is still work to do, we are quietly optimistic that the apprenticeship will be ready for the first students in the Autumn this year. Early in June we will be issuing a special edition of the SalesPulse dedicated to this subject. This is a great opportunity for companies of all sizes to improve their selling capabilities, with help from the government’s apprenticeship levy fund.

HARMONISE ALL YOUR RESOURCES TO IMPROVE SALES EFFECTIVENESS

In the last two issues of The SalesPulse™, which you can see in our blog, we have discussed how you utilise your resources in a harmonised manner to tackle your challenges. We have used sales effectiveness as an example, after all this is a sales newsletter! In the January edition we identified your resources as, customers, people, infrastructure (processes and systems), investment funds and company culture. In both that issue and last month’s we discussed how we can apply investment, people, and infrastructure to improve sales effectiveness. In this issue we will look at your customers and company culture and the role they play in improving sales effectiveness.

Customers are arguably your best and most valuable asset, but are grossly under used because the people who serve them, be they sales people, customer services or management may not necessarily have confidence in what your company delivers. Few have customer satisfaction surveys, delivery follow-up questionnaires, customer experience programmes or a senior manager asking a customer “How are we doing”? Nobody likes to be told “Badly” – but in many cases that might very well be the case. We all know that customer satisfaction drives loyalty and repeat/enhancement business. But it also drives business from new customers, if used correctly.

Do you have a referrals sales strategy? Referrals are a highly, if not the most effective way of generating sales, and there a number of ways in which referrals operate. However, the most effective one is the personal referral. Here are just a few statistics related to the subject

83% of consumers are willing to refer after a positive experience—yet only 29% actually do. (Source Texas Tech University)

92% of respondents trusted referrals from people they knew. (Source Nielsen)

People are 4 times more likely to buy when referred by a friend. (Source Nielsen)

For many small businesses, referrals are the only way they do business. Irrespective of the size of your business, a referrals strategy is a must. Click here for The SalesPulse Academy’s referrals introduction.

Another customer activity which can inform strategy is the “voice of the customer”. For this to be successful you need to collect feedback after each interaction, even if it is as simple as “Give me a score out of ten” for this service or sales meeting. It is very illuminating how something this simple can give you enormously valuable strategic input.

Moving on now to the topic of company culture. In one or two words how would you simply describe yours? Do any of these ring a bell? Hierarchical, autocratic, siloed, controlling, internally focused, technically led, unempowered, customer centric, engaging, family values, entrepreneurial and I am sure there are a lot more. These adjectives are the ones that sprung to mind, they are conditioned, not from a Google search or from a management book, but from experience. What struck me about them, was there were more negatives than positives, but perhaps I have had a lot of bad experiences!

What is the most important asset most companies have? I would say customers. Where on organisations charts are the people who deal with these valuable assets? Unless you are Timpson’s or a few other empowered, engaging and customer centric companies, the customer facing staff are at the bottom of the chart. The key point in this is; if you are changing a strategy or implementing a new one, will your culture facilitate it?For example the most common cause of failure in mergers and acquisitions is conflicting cultures. Going back to our example of sales effectiveness, if your culture is controlling, your non-sales customer facing people will not go the extra mile, do the unexpected, or bend a company rule to ensure the customer is totally satisfied. In this case your sales effectiveness improvement strategy will be impaired.

Your new strategy is important. Inspect every one of your resources because each one will have an impact on its success or otherwise.

The SalesPulse Insight

What is the main reason that you lose sales campaigns? Do you lose on price or features or service or some other reason? Let me say, in my opinion these are not reasons, they are excuses. There is only one real reason, and that is you were outsold. Understand the reasons for this, improve your win rate and make selling your competitive advantage.

I closed last month’s issueby saying that improving sales effectiveness is not just sales strategy. If you treat it as this it will not generate the results you hope for, or expect, and you will miss out on a vast improvement potential. Just in case you didn’t read last month’s issue, below is set out a sample menu of actions the sales department could undertake to improve its effectiveness. It is not intended to be comprehensive and I am sure you could think of many more.

1) implement a CRM/sales automation system aligned to a new streamlined sales process

5) optimise sales time utilisation by segmenting customer base and deploying best resources to service major accounts and scarce resourcing others

6) identify and monitor a set of relevant KPIs, take appropriate remedial action should failure to meet them arise.

The point I was making is that you need to muster all your assets to improve sales effectiveness, or indeed any other business strategy. Let’s look at people first. I said last time that “people make things happen” and that if you empower them they will make the right things happen. This referred to salespeople but the same applies to people in other functions. If you take customer service and support, motivated people empowered to “go the extra mile” for the customer will have satisfied customers, and these positively impact business results and sales effectiveness. There is no point implementing a sales effectiveness improvement programme if your customer service sucks! Similarly, other well motivated and engaged people who have customer contact will leave a positive feeling. There are plenty of scholarly and practical papers available on the subject, here is one from Forbes.

Another of your assets that need to be drawn into such a programme are your business processes. These drive your business. Many of these processes are automated, and as such they are operated by business professionals, rather than admin. people. Here are a few questions (and answers borne out of experience) regarding processes:

– Who are they designed for? – Specialists

– Are they documented? – No

– Are they idiot proof? – No

– Are they internally or customer focused? – Internally

If your processes look like this, they afford every chance of delay and possibly failure. In the context of sales effectiveness, there seems little point in spending lots of money to speed up the sales process if the order processing process/system remains unchanged. More orders means more bottlenecks!

In last month’s edition, we said there were five resources to consider in any business. We have covered, money, people and infrastructure. Next time we will look at customers and company culture. I know that smaller company owners and directors might say, “yes I can see this being relevant to bigger organisations”. Let me assure you though, it is appropriate to all organisations.

The SalesPulse Insight – Think before you invest in sales training!

A lot has been written about the long term effectiveness, or more specifically the ineffectiveness of sales training. Training is not an event, but many companies still think it is. The most effective sales training occurs when the delivery, practice and follow up is done over a period of time. You cannot change behaviour in a single course. Behaviour change requires a structured approach and time.

We are now well into 2017 and you will have set your objectives for the year or someone will have discussed them with you before you agreed them. I have never come across anyone in sales who at this time of year has said “well this is a doddle”! It is not in the make-up of sales people to do so and while managers, directors and owners might imply it, in their private moments they know it not to be the case. Whether your challenge is growth, improved margins, less churn or new customer acquisition, the resources you will have at your disposal will, by definition, be restricted in volume and limited in scope. So what are they? I would suggest the following.

1) your customers – they are your fundamental asset

2) your people – they make things happen

3) your infrastructure – it facilitates the business process(es)

4) your investment funds – they facilitate your business strategy and

5) your company ethos and values – they are the heartbeat of your business.

When organisations think about addressing their challenges rarely do they consider all their resources and harmonise their activities to ensure success. In this first of a series of newsletters we will look at how decisions taken without considering the whole asset base will fare.

Let’s take improving sales effectiveness as an example and start with the assumption that we know what improving sales effectiveness might really mean. The sorts of things that people do when addressing this as a strategy are:

1) implement a CRM/sales automation system aligned to a new streamlined sales process

5) optimise sales time utilisation by segmenting customer base and deploying best resources to service major accounts and scarce resourcing others

6) identify and monitor a set of relevant KPIs, take appropriate remedial action should failure to meet them arise.

This all seems fair enough doesn’t it, but is it? Will this approach work? I would say it will work in part but not have the desired effect. It is easy to focus on the negatives so let’s examine how it could be made to work. Success will depend not only on implementation but on how the strategy is developed. Classic British management is top down, and this has a number of counter-productive traits. One of these is lack of trust. On the other hand, trust can be a massive motivator and engagement mechanism. It says to the people, you know your job and know how to improve it. Provide the guidelines but let the sales people create the strategy and then help them deliver it. The result is that it will work far better than a top down approach.

Improving sales effectiveness is not just a sales strategy, to make it really work it has to be a company strategy. It is not just the sales force that impacts sales effectiveness; the whole organisation and asset base impacts it. In the next editions of The SalesPulse we will discuss how these can be used to your best advantage.

The SalesPulse Insight – What’s in a brand?

Everything the marketers will tell you, but is it? Let’s consider the impacts of a damaged brand. Everyone is aware of the Samsung Note 7 problem. For example, the airlines will not let you take them on a plane and in the UK we generally rubbish the brand because of it. But what are the real impacts? Markets react differently, and, in the world’s largest consumer market the Samsung brand leads on quality, price and referral, and to complete the picture their quarter four profits are up by over 50 percent. (Source: Economic Times India 25th January, 2017). There must be some lessons for us all in this!

A SPECIAL TIME FOR ENJOYMENT AND REFLECTION

The Christmas and New Year period is fast approaching and it gives us all quality time with family and friends. It also offers time to reflect on 2016, the highs and lows and to think about those 2017 challenges. It is of course the time to make a New Year’s resolution. Some of us make them to address personal behaviours, but we can also make them for business. You may not even make a new year’s resolution but that doesn’t matter as I am sure you will want to improve your business. So here are a few suggestions for you to consider, all of which will have a positive impact:

Put the customer first – lead by example and spend at least one day a week talking with your customers, understanding their issues and opportunities. Ensure your management colleagues have a plan to meet their counterparts in your key customers. Don’t do either in isolation, make sure your, and their actions are in line with your sales plans.

And on the subject of sales plans –do you have simple but structured plans for your best customers that are understood by everyone who is involved, or could possibly be involved with them?

Simplify your business – set an objective to reduce, or preferably eliminate the number of the inessential processes (See SalesPulse™ #132)

Your engine room of growth is your sales team, even if you are the sales team. Work on the basis that “you don’t have to be sick to get better”! Identify appropriate learning and implement it. Don’t waste it; if you don’t embed it, it will be lost in a very short period of time

Review your differentiation strategy and your USPs(Unique selling propositions). Are they as robust as you think they are? When did you last undertake a comprehensive review of your competitors? Early in 2017 might be a good time to do one

On an easy to implement sales initiative – how much of your new or enhancement business comes from referrals? Personal referrals are the best form of sales leads, and the most winnable. The SalesPulse Academy has an online learning module covering this subject. Why not have a look at it. It’s free so treat it as a Christmas present from us.

Business results, customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction are all intrinsically linked. The key driver is employee satisfaction. Ask yourself, “how motivated are our people”? or “do they come to work because they want to or because they have to”? If they are low on motivation and work because they have to, there is either a risk or a big opportunity to improve business performance.

On behalf of us all at Koru, I would like to wish you a very happy Christmas and peaceful, prosperous and enjoyable 2017.

I was browsing through some articles the other day and came across this quote which I like:

“If you don’t have a heart beat, you don’t have a life. If you don’t have customers, you don’t have a business. But do you really treat your customers like the vital organ they really are? Are all your decisions taken with the customers’ view in mind”?

Also in this article, there were sections on collaboration, speed of change and reaction to it, sales and marketing alignment and where you have the conversations that drive business transactions. This all seems pretty topical and I have heard about them all in the last six months. But the article, from the founder of Selling Power Magazine was produced in 2011. If the article had been written in the 1980’s, it would still be relevant today.

There is no doubt that there has been massive change over the last 35 and probably as much again over the last 5. A lot has been driven by pervasive technology i.e. the internet; by revolutions that caused anything proprietary to be seen as bad; by more demanding customers and more professional buyers; by legislation and regulation; disruptive market entrants and the list goes on and will continue to go on. It brings on that good old cliché “that the only thing that’s constant is change”. But is it?

Having been a sales person, manager and marketer in the 1980s let me comment on the content of the article. Back then we had the sales/marketing divide and recognised then that it was not good for business. The company in which I worked at the time introduced industry marketing to help bridge the gap between the product marketers and the sales people, and it worked. A good customer of ours once said that domain knowledge not products win business, and they were right. On the subject of collaboration, or co-creation as it is known today, it was an issue in the 1980s. But rather than just talking about it we did something and built an industry software portfolio though customer and partner collaboration. I have to say that on the subject of conversations we were very limited as to where we had them, but we did have them where our customers wanted them. We didn’t have social media or even email, but we did have pubs and understood market and customer issues. As for the pace of change and managing it, I am not sure the words engagement and empowerment were known then; but we did have a very motivated and creative sales force which was key to helping us manage through some turbulent times. The final thing to cover is the opening quote; this is all about customer centricity or intimacy. We understood it then and managed it through having good account teams and sales people who championed the customer’s cause.

The issues raised in this article are all basic, so my question is why are we still having the same discussions today as we had 35 years ago?

I have my views, but they are not important. Yours are and I would be grateful to hear them. I will though give you a summary of my 1980’s experience. The company that I, and most of my Koru colleagues worked with had great foresight and leadership. It created massive market share because it faced and managed the issues that this newsletter identified at the start. We had no Customer Relationship Management system, we had people who managed customer relationships; we had no expensive sales methodologies like SPIN or Miller Heiman, just well managed competent, engaged and entrepreneurial sales people; we had no sales or marketing automation tools, no customer experience software or any of the many so called productivity tools available today. But maybe that is part of the reason. It was simple and we could spend the maximum time with customers and not be tied to computer systems that add work but little value. We lived for and with our customers.

In the last edition of The SalesPulse I talked about simplifying your business by looking at your processes. In this edition I am going to build on that by looking at a crucial aspect of the way we generally work and find a better way of doing it. I am using sales as the example but it is relevant in all aspects of business.

Over the last couple of months, I have attended two conference, four webinars and read many articles, all of which were sales related and one word was common to all of them. It wasn’t customers or clients; it wasn’t benefits; and it wasn’t solving their problems. The word is “Review”. It came up in many different contexts and from my own personal experience as a sales manager/director I too used it many times, (far too many times). One finds that the bigger the company the more reviews there are of sales people. Sales people know about reviews and in general terms they know how to manage them; they give away the minimum amount of information but enough to get the reviewer off their case. Those people who are not sales people but who have to sell are far more open which is good, but they can be that way as they have lots of other things to do. Their reviewers are generally not that saes savvy so it’s a more relaxed affair.

I have looked up the dictionary definition of “review” and nowhere does it state that the person being reviewed should be beaten up for not getting an order on the date they promised, nor does it say that people outside of the sales discipline should tell sales people what to do and how to do it. So we need to ask the question why are people constantly reviewed? Because there are very few accepted sales qualifications (I know of one degree level course), sales is part of the curriculum in no more than two per cent of Business Studies degrees and there is no sales module in any MBAs, I put it down to poor education. While this is a deplorable situation (watch this space for a quantum leap in formal sales qualifications) sadly this is not the case. The truth of the matter is the dominant management style in Britain is CONTROLLING; micro management or command and control is the way most managers work. To quote one of the most successful managers in English football, the late Brian Clough. “We’ll discuss it for five minutes then we’ll do it my way”! Hold on I hear you say, Clough was really successful and that is true, but he was not a manager, he was a leader. And he had a right hand man, Peter Taylor who was an exceptional coach. It is the coaching approach that will obviate the reviewing culture that is so common in sales.

I can hear the next question now. “How will I know what is going on if I don’t review my people”? As I said earlier reviewing is a flawed process, so start to concentrate on the “hows” of the job rather than just the “whats”. Spending time with your people understanding their issues, helping them to find solutions, helping them to develop their own performance improvement plans, supporting them through their development process and trusting them more will create a peer to peer relationship, rather than one of manager/subordinate. As the relationship develops the coach will become trusted and will gain more insights into the exact position in sales campaigns. The person being coached will become more engaged with their manager and their organisation. The outcomes will be better motivated, higher performing and loyal sales people. This is not theory as I did it for several years as a first line sales manager and never held a review of any sort. However, I will admit it was a case of unconscious competence.

How is it applicable to other parts of a company? Those of you in manufacturing will know and many will understand continuous improvement. At its heart continuous improvement (CI) is based upon mutual trust, employee engagement and empowerment. The removal of unnecessary work, that we discussed last time, is also a key component. Not only does CI work in manufacturing but it is deployed in many types of business including the public sector. If you would like to know more about CI, contact me through Linked In.

As the year end is nigh, remember, there are only 40 selling days until Christmas; only do things that help your people sell, a daily review of their prospects does not help!